MUST BE SPRINGTIME, THE WIND IS BLOWING............

 One of the pleasures of spring in the desert, lots of wind, but the days are nice and sunny, so I guess it's a trade-off.  

Suzanne and her mom have been back from cold snowy dreary grey Midwest about a week.  Her mom is thrilled with all the sunshine and the warm weather.  The nights are still chilly enough there is ice on the water buckets in the morning, but it seems like every morning the ice is thinner and thinner.  Won't be long before it warms up enough to be able to run the hoses in the morning and fill the water buckets.  

The donkeys are doing good, now that Suzanne is back some of them will be doing some burro racing in California, N.M. and of course Arizona.  They all got their feet trimmed this week-end, in preparation for the 1st race in about 3 weeks for a lot of them.  This will be N.M.'s 1st ever race, so everyone is looking forward to it.  There will even be a race in Tennessee this year.  The sport has really been discovered in the last 6 years or so, with lots of new faces showing up to participate in the fun. Suzanne is taking a trailer full of donkeys to CA, John and I will stay home and take care of the ones that don't go.  This will be the 3rd year our donkeys have went out there to run.  

When the donkeys got their feet trimmed the only one we didn't know about was Beefy.  He wasn't here the last time Dan did feet.  Justice is a little better each time, although Dan still has to Scotch hobble him.  This link shows how a Scotch hobble works, although it's a little fancier, Dan just uses a cargo strap.  Each time he comes Justice gives up a little quicker, so hopefully soon he won't need the hobble.  

When he got to Beefy he tried to pick up his rear feet and Beefy said I don't think so.  He wasn't really mean, or kicking trying to connect, but he wasn't going to cooperate, so out comes the cargo strap.  Beefy is big enough and strong enough, he could be formable, but Dan got him trimmed without putting him on the ground, which is better than the 1st time with Justice...!!! LOL  

Last night Suzanne came in late to tell us she had heard Beefy braying and it sounded really close to her trailer.  She opened the door and there he was.  Wouldn't really be that much of a surprise, but the donkeys hadn't been let out of their pens for the night yet.  She came out to put him back in his pen and was scolding him when she went around the corner of the pens.  There stood Jasper, which explained how Beefy got out.  Jasper is one of our official gate openers unless the gate is double locked and someone forgot to lock Jasper's.  Beefy's pen use to be Jasper's so he probably just walked down there and opened the gate, since he knows Beefy leaves hay sometimes.  

This is Jasper trying to see if there are any cookies on the golf cart yesterday.

  

If he only knew, Kathy one of the volunteers just brought in 2 big boxes of little cinnamon cookies today.  She is busy cleaning water buckets and always brings goodies for the "fur" kids.  Yesterday the donkeys got special cookies Linda sent from Colorado for their Valentine's day treat.  

Not sure what we're going to do for hay buckets in the future.  When we first started weighing hay we found 18 gallon rope buckets and they were really cheap, which is a good thing, since they don't last very long.  They split and crack and eventually aren't useable.  It seems every time we reorder them, they are thinner, which means they split and crack quicker.........!!!  I just went in to order a bunch of new ones and they now seem to cost about 4 or 5 times each for what they use to cost a few years ago and they have less plastic in them, by weight.  Almost all the places that sell them, say they aren't available right now, even at the higher prices.  Not sure what the answer is, but it is a problem......!!!   

This morning Suzanne came in and said there was water soaking the ground around the blue barrel that covers the well head for the water well. Hmmm..........that can't be good.  A few days ago one of the visitors on a tour, clipped the barrel when they were leaving with the car, not bad, but obviously bad enough to crack the pvc pipe to the well.  Haven't heard back from the local well guy, so don't know when he will get a chance to come out to hopefully fix it.